Does Age Discrimination Law Increase Labor Market Discrimination Against Older Workers

The current recession has hit the youngest cohorts the hardest, but in many ways the saddest stories come from the older cohorts of workers. Unemployment among fiftysomethings is lower than among twentysomethings, but those people in their fifties who have lost their jobs face an extraordinarily bleak outlook. And in an interest article on the evolution of retirement in America, Emily Yoffe suggests that the adoption of rules banning mandatory retirement policies have actually made things worse:
“Basically, it’s a mess,” says [Steven A.] Sass of the world of retirement today. He says employers liked mandatory retirement because it allowed for an orderly and predictable departure from the payroll. But that certainty is gone at a time that, more than ever, older workers need to find new jobs. In the 1980s, Sass says, about 75 percent of 50-year old workers would be at the same company 10 years later. Today, only half of 60 year-olds are working at the same place that employed them at age 50. In Working Longer, he and [Alicia ] Munnell float what he calls the “somewhat scandalous” suggestion that the prohibition on mandatory retirement be repealed—allowing companies to impose it, he suggests, at the “politically feasible” age of 70. “Unless employers have an assurance they have a way to get rid of older employees, they won’t hire older workers,” he says.
Sass, Munnell, and the team at Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research are some of the best in the business so I doubt they arrived at that conclusion frivolously.

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The retirement savings crisis in America has brought us to this point: It’s a near certainty that mandatory savings accounts are in the future of anyone with a full- or part-time job. The world’s largest investment firm BlackRock, with $4 trillion under management and a lot of weight to throw around, is the latest to sound the call. “We need a comprehensive solution to retirement savings that includes some form of mandatory retirement savings,” CEO Laurence Fink said this week.

The retirement savings crisis in America has brought us to this point: It’s a near certainty that mandatory savings accounts are in the future of anyone with a full- or part-time job. The world’s largest investment firm BlackRock, with $4 trillion under management and a lot of weight to throw around, is the latest to sound the call. “We need a comprehensive solution to retirement savings that includes some form of mandatory retirement savings,” CEO Laurence Fink said this week.

The retirement savings crisis in America is so acute that at least one prominent thinker on the subject is calling for a mandatory savings program above and beyond existing 401(k) and other pension plans. “The nation requires a new, mandatory tier of retirement accounts, initiated by the federal government but managed by the private sector, that will replace about 20% of pre-retirement earnings,” Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, told Bloomberg News.

The retirement savings crisis in America is so acute that at least one prominent thinker on the subject is calling for a mandatory savings program above and beyond existing 401(k) and other pension plans. “The nation requires a new, mandatory tier of retirement accounts, initiated by the federal government but managed by the private sector, that will replace about 20% of pre-retirement earnings,” Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, told Bloomberg News.

The popular narrative holds that age discrimination is off the charts and employers can’t shed workers past 50 quickly enough. Yet age-related complaints filed with the federal government fell for the sixth consecutive year in 2014, and the percentage of cases found to be reasonable have been trending lower for two decades.

The popular narrative holds that age discrimination is off the charts and employers can’t shed workers past 50 quickly enough. Yet age-related complaints filed with the federal government fell for the sixth consecutive year in 2014, and the percentage of cases found to be reasonable have been trending lower for two decades.

High school and college kids typically get the jobs that are left over, that no one else really wants, such as working at McDonalds.
However, competition for any job is no so intense, that teens cannot find any job that no one else wants.
As a result of that increased competition, Number of high-school students with jobs hits 20-year low

Total nonfarm payroll employment declined by 125,000 in June, and the unemployment rate edged down to 9.5 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The decline in payroll employment reflected a decrease (-225,000) in the number of temporary employees working on Census 2010. Private-sector payroll employment edged up by 83,000. I will be amazed if the unemployment rate is not higher 3 months from now. And I will be surprised if we don’t add over 400,000 jobs in the next 3 months.